Schools to open - Chris comments in AJ today
Our Director Chris Boyce was asked for comment last week on the potential impact of learners returning to school in England on the 1st June, despite calls for this deadline to be moved or scrapped in favour of returning after the summer break.
The issue is complex with parents keen to get back to work, or being pushed back by employers who are trying to save their businesses, and who have been trapped in their homes for 8 weeks trying to work and home school their younger children in the middle of a Global Health Pandemic of unique proportions in living memory.
Chris’s contribution is available to download here
The article features contributions from some of the leading voices in education design and offers many different view points on what is a divisive political issue.
Chris is quoted by Richard Waite and Will Ing of the AJ team:
“For some architects, however – and, indeed, for the teaching unions – the government’s back-to-school plans have simply come too early and do not sufficiently protect either the children or the staff.
Chris Boyce of Assorted Skills + Talents, who has worked on more than 40 schools during his career says: ‘The only way to beat this virus is not to go back to school and for human contact to be minimised for all of us. We have to get the R rate down to 0.1/0.2 or less.
‘The virus needs us – without a host, it dies after only a matter of days. But can we do this with a government set on ensuring we put the most-mobile and least-hygienic group of humans – children – back into the classroom?’ He adds that the three primary school years selected to return include the children who are ‘the hardest to manage and predict’, as well as ‘the least-affected upper years’.
Boyce says: ‘Kids are not predictable and, from my experience over the years (and as a father of five), this issue won’t just be spatial – distancing in class will be impossible to deal with for most schools, as the [National Union of Teachers] has stated already. We just can’t rush this, and children really don’t need to be in school now anyway.’”
The article can be access behind a paywall here: